The materials published in this feature are led by my introduction to a symposium on the poetry and poetics of 1960. The introduction you'll read here is more or less just as I spoke it a few months ago at the Writers House in Philadelphia. Since then, Gordon Faylor and I have gathered somewhat revised versions of the presentations made that evening. We then solicited responses from various others and we are happy to present these also as part of our 1960 feature, along with several other images and documents. I have been obsessively tracking 1960 doings and writings — reading, watching (film and TV), researching, interviewing, cross-referencing, following apparently meaningless leads; some of these have been posted to my blog “1960.” Needless to say, then, I was delighted to have 1960-obsessed company for a night in December 2010 — and then, further, throughout the following weeks and months as I worked with the original presenters and added respondents.
Hannah Weiner’s The Book Of Revelations was composed in 1989 or shortly thereafter in a notebook given to the poet by her friend and artistic collaborator Barbara Rosenthal. This new virtual edition, assembled, annotated, and introduced by Marta L. Werner, offers a facsimile of the notebook’s pages, a diplomatic transcript of the work, and a searchable text transcript of the notebook, along with extensive notes and commentary.
Twentieth-century Brazilian art is known for its hugely influential avant-garde and countercultural movements. One might think, for example, of the poesia concreta or concrete poetry movement pioneered by Décio Pignatari and Haroldo and Augusto de Campos in the 1950s, or of the equally subversive, cross-genre Tropicalismo or Tropicália movement led by musicians and lyricists Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil in the 1960s.
